Alex Wright will give one of the keynote speeches at the upcoming Summit. He’s the author of a book on the history of information architecture that I read in draft, and that I’ve thought about quite a bit off and on over the last year. I just read a solid article in the New Yorker on retroviruses, and the fact that they’re embedded in our genetic makeup – which makes for a handy way to look at our ancestral past, as well as apparently a way of understanding plagues and their futures. (Steve Johnson, another keynoter, wrote a book on cholera, so I’m always thinking PLAGUE PLAGUE PLAGUE these days.)

Alex’s work isn’t all that different, in some ways. He’s looking back into the history of information architecture – and prehistory as well, frankly – in order to understand the roots of what information architecture is today. I remember other kids in school who didn’t believe in learning history, because they wanted to make the future. (“History is bunk,” they echoed Henry Ford, although honestly I don’t think they said “bunk,” necessarily.) The fact is, there are good reasons to ignore history. If the people who founded Facebook had dwelled on PlanetAll, my guess is that we’d all still be looking only at Myspace pages. But for most of us, the lessons of history are darned handy. I’ve learned a lot from technology cycles, and it has served me well as an analyst, a worker and a consumer. (I just recently decided not to buy a gadget after remembering it is first generation, and first-generation does not intersect well with my temperament.)

Webs that failed and the iterations of the Web we use are critical, then. Alex will give us a sense of our shared past and the abortive pasts that in some cases came from even before we took mouse in hand.

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Thanks Whit,

I’m looking forward to speaking at Gartner about why I think we should still care about these early pre-Web systems. If the history of technology teaches us anything, it’s that the best solution doesn’t always win (see: Sony Betamax, or the Mac OS). Today, the Web is starting to show signs of strain that point up some of its fundamental shortcomings: like the fragility of hyperlinks, the lack of a true session state, and all kinds of problems around copyrights and intellectual property. As developers continue to grapple with the constraints imposed by these limitations, I think it’s useful to step back and look at how some of the early hypertext pioneers addressed these issues.

For example, visionary thinkers like Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam imagined a very different kind of hyperlink from what we know today. Nelson thought deeply about how to handle intellectual property issues. And other early hypertext developers came up with things like built-in archiving, two-way linking and hypermedia features embedded in the desktop GUI. As far back as the 1930s, Paul Otlet was thinking about how social networks might change the way people interacted with documents. Today, most of this important work has been all but forgotten amid the ongoing frenzy of Web development.

Today, the Web has become such a dominant technological fact that it’s had for us to imagine how things might have turned out differently. But it’s worth taking a look back to explore some of these early systems. And more importantly, I think it’s helpful to understand that the Web didn’t just magically come into being one day; there’s a deeper history here.

What frustrates me about the relentless march forward is that while I do believe in the innovation credo that just because something failed before, doesn't mean it will fail again, I also believe that understanding history -- even history so young that it might still be in your History Folder -- is a critical aspect of understanding this business deeply. I absolutely believe that it's valuable to create operations like YouTube and Facebook, but most of us don't choose such sweepstakes competitions as our paths. Instead, we work hard for other people, whether our clients (whose faces we know) or our paymasters, and we need to take fewer risks, and exploit more lessons. I want to know what didn't work, and I want to know why, and I want to know what to do to have a better chance that MY idea WILL WORK -- because that might not make me rich, but it will improve my annual review. Maybe that's not transformational, but it is taking care of business, and that's valuable too.